You Rock

(and the rocks of ages)

We returned to Babbacombe Beech last week, interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the source of a previous poem, the sonnet, “Rose Petal“. It was a balmy summer’s day that we chose to take my granddaughter to ponder life in the rock pools of a small shaded little cove along the bay.

As for “Rose Petal” and perhaps as a continuation of the theme, which encapsulated that poem and the associated blog post, this too has time relativities as its perspective. Only this time on a bigger scale; at the other end of the time spectrum (the life of a rose and humanity beside the age of the universe)!

There are one or two other sources of inspiration, prompts for these streams of consciousness, if you like, that have contributed to this poem. The first was a BBC podcast, “Is Philosophy Dead” – or some similar title – in ‘The Monkey Cage” series, featuring Professor Brian Cox. In this they pondered, with some humour of course, the philosophical thought that, without human consciousness there could be no proof or observation of cosmological phenomena, relying as they do so much on complicated mathematics and particle physics to explain those that are outside the reach of even the largest telescopes.

This poem also dovetails in a way with another blog post and poem I wrote earlier in the year, “Reality vs. Unreality“, which itself was the result of a BBC Horizon documentary on the same subject.

(Read the Poem)

The last two lines, I think, provide a perhaps controversial ending that will, I hope, prompt further philosophical debate.